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Ad Code: 3
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Block Island Vista (Rhode Island)
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| An artist, printmaker, and professor, Frederick Becker was born in Oakland California and was raised in Hollywood, where his father, Frederick Becker, Sr., was a silent film actor. He studied at the Otis Art Institute and in 1933, moved to New York to study architecture at New York University. However, he changed his mind because he wanted the freedoms of printmaking and drawing.
In the early 1930s, he began his career with "quirky characterizations of musicians made during frequent visits to Manhattan jazz clubs and lively observations of the urban scene, done with a Surrealist touch."
In 1935, he began doing etchings and wood engravings for the Graphic Arts Division of the Works Progress Administration, and in 1940, he enrolled in Atelier 17, the Graphics workshop of British engraver, Stanley William Hayter. During this time, Becker turned to abstraction with color print methods learned from Hayter. By the mid 1950s, his style had turned from Surrealism and Constructivism to Abstract Expressionism.
He served in World War II, and in 1946 began teaching at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Two years later, he went to Washington University in St. Louis, where he created the printmaking department and taught for twenty years. Then he taught at the Fine Arts Department of the University of Massachusetts from 1968 to 1986.
He died on June 30, 2004 at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Source:
"The New York Times", Obituary by Grace Glueck, July 12, 2004
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Biography from Annex Galleries:
| Fred Becker was born in Oakland, California in 1913 and raised in
Hollywood where his father, Fred Becker, Sr., was an actor in silent
films. Becker's studied at the Otis Art Institute in 1931 where
he was introduced to printmaking. In the fall of 1933, Becker
relocated to New York and registered at New York University in
architectural studies and at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design on 44th
Street.
Becker was part of the Graphic Arts Division of the
WPA. He worked on the WPA between 1935 and to the day he was
"laid off" the project in the summer of 1939. An exhibition in
1937 at the Federal Art Project Gallery in New York included two of his
prints and the following year his work was exhibited at the Willard
Gallery in New York.
S. W. Hayter opened the doors of his
Atelier 17 workshop in New York in 1940. Becker signed up for classes
and found there another free, informal and imaginative place to learn
and work; however, with the entry of the US into World War II in 1941,
Becker left the city, relocated to Long Island and found employment in
the war industry until he was drafted into the military in 1945.
Returning from the war in 1946, Becker accepted a teaching position at
Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. After two
years, he moved to Saint Louis where he joined the faculty of
Washington University and established their printmaking department.
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